Software Management Group

On the SMP 7.5 console, there are 3 Windows Application Management policies that are disabled by default

.

What is the best practice on using these? Is it advised to use them daily? Weekly? Monthly? As needed? What is the recommended target? From my understanding, running these can proactively decrease Windows Installer issues. Problem is I can find very little information on how to use them. I have found articles only on what they are used for. 

Any and all information is greatly appreciated as I think these are overlooked more than they are used.

I have not used this myself.  In my opinion, I think running it daily would be overkill.  From what I understand, the source path update goes through and finds all packages that have source paths that are unavailable and will swich them to whatever package server the client is associated with.  Have you seen the articles below?

http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=HOWTO93503
http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=HOWTO93508

I would avoid running those unless you are really having issues with Windows installer.

"Source Path Update" will change where Windows thinks the application was installed from. If you look in HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\GUID\InstallSource will hold the path that the package was installed from. Windows needs this in order to perform a self heal or repair and in some cases for an uninstall if the local software cache is missing.

Windows installer repair will do things like re-registering the service which I assume the quick one would perform and full repair might go so far as to reinstall the windows installer components.

I honestly almost never need to use those, I've only had a handfull of computers that throw errors like "Windows Installer Service Could not be accessed". I would definantly not run those on a schedule.

Soon, and I'm dreading the day, I need to move my software repository from a share hosted on an old physical server to a DFS share and then I would run the source path update for every piece of software installed.

Jason

I forgot to mention exactly what Jason stated.  Not using them unless you have issues.

I can only echo what has said above; these policies are not enabled by default as most environments should not require them. We tend to find that our applications behave themselves (we moved to local application sources  many years ago and use in the main the vendors MSIs).

If you DO require these to be run, consider these policies to be sticking plasters which give you time deal with the root cause.

If you are interested in taking this route (maybe you suspect issues?), I'd suggest a pilot' it on a small group of machines and then look software management reports to establish how the remdiation fared,

As to how frequently you want to run the remedation policies, that depends purely on how often you think the applications be broken. The only scenario I can think that this will crop up regularly, is perhaps with applications created by the snapshot method (as if this isn't done well, other application data can be captured and broken).
 

Thanks for the information. I have never used these before either. Honestly, I have overlooked them in most of my implementations. Something caught my eye this time though. Maybe they added a new description in 7.5. It sounds like a good idea, but my thoughts were exactly your thoughts. I will be leaving them disabled. I was hoping for a Symantec chime in with a "best practice" versus common practices.

In enterprise environments, the often quoted best practice is to have MSI repositories on remote file shares. When these are restructured or migrated, broken source paths can result. This is where tools like this come in handy.

Just had a chat with our lead application packager, and he tends to find that modern MSIs tend to just behave themselves. If an application breaks it is generally a symptom of a deeper problem.

But... it could just be we've got nice users.... ;-) 

Do you want to trade users :)

Where's that 'like' button when you need it... ;-)